Abstract

The thermal protective clothing for high-temperature operation usually consists of three-layer fabrics and a gap called the air layer or Layer IV between Layer III and skin. In order to design more effective thermal protective clothing at less cost, based on the heat transfer principles, we establish heat transfer models of fabrics and air layer, which are one-dimensional nonlinear partial differential equations with constant coefficients. In the three-layer fabrics, we consider the effects of heat conduction and heat radiation in Layer I but only consider heat conduction in Layer II and Layer III. Furthermore, the heat transfer model of Layer IV is decoupled and simplified to steady-state heat conduction in Layer IV and radiation heat transfer on surface of Layer IV. According to the explicit difference schemes for the models, we use the parameters in an experiment which puts a thermal manikin in high-temperature environment for some time and measures the temperature of lateral skin at regular time, to solve the models and calculate the temperature of each layer. With MATLAB, the visual interface of three-dimensional temperature distribution is provided, which is reference for functional design of thermal protective clothing. We also compare the simulation result of skin surface with the experimental data. The results show that at the same position, the temperature rises over time but with decreasing rate and finally reaches the steady state. Moreover, at one moment after reaching the steady state, the temperature has a gradual decrease with the increase of distance from the external environment.

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